The 8 Most Important Personality Types Every Manager Needs (on Their Team)

As a manager, building a balanced team should be one of your top priorities. With the right mix of personalities, you can cover each and every area, from planning and compliance to vision and design.

When you hear the term “personality types”, your mind might first go straight to the Myers-Briggs. But let’s be honest, it’s not an exact science. Instead, we’re going to focus more on practical traits and the roles that suit them best.

With the right mix of team member personalities placed in the right roles, you can begin to develop team behavior that will lead to success.

FAQs

1. The leader

Your leader doesn’t need to be an expert in any particular field. They act more as the driving force behind your progress. Leaders have a vision of how projects should look at the end, and use problem solving skills to resolve issues along the way.

Leaders have team management personalities and are almost always found in managerial roles. They don’t get down into the nitty gritty of each individual task, but they are often mentors to their team members and encourage others to meet deadlines and improve professionally and personally.

Your leaders should be able to confidently make decisions with the overall goal in mind, which can cause conflict in the team. It’s for this reason that leaders should be mediators. Having earned the respect of their team, they should be able to stay fair and coolheaded in difficult times, finding solutions that benefit the project as a whole.

In summary, leadership skills should encompass aspects of each of the other personality types. For example, they need to have a good, but not expert, understanding of the team’s goal, and be able to plan a project, albeit not in granular detail. This essentially makes them generalists by nature, but their vision and influence make them an integral part of any team.

2. The planner

Your planner is a perfectionist who leaves no stone unturned and brings structure to the team effort. They are meticulous with budgets and timeframes, and quick to point out when a new idea doesn’t fit within the scope. That’s no bad thing though — you’d much rather spend your time discussing ideas that are actually possible.

Planners know their way around project management tools and can accurately create a roadmap of tasks for the duration of a job. The best planners will also take into account each team member’s workload and assign tasks in a way that shares responsibility fairly. They are keen to know all the little details to turn guesswork into data-driven estimations and take pride in what they create.

However, this kind of laser focus can often go hand-in-hand with a blinkered view of the bigger picture. Make sure your leader reviews their ideas before sharing them with the whole team.

During the project, their focus on punctuality means they can often become frustrated when their deadlines aren’t met, and it’s up to your leader to translate this into encouragement. When reviewing projects, your planner will be looking for ways to improve in the future, and should identify areas where they’ve underestimated capabilities. Their analysis of past performance will be vital in the team’s continued improvement.

3. The communicator

Keep your technical workers doing what they do best and make your communicator the face of your team. They are the one you send to meet new clients, to talk at press conferences, and to lead your presentations.

They don’t have to be an out-and-out specialist in your field, but if they don’t have a good all-round knowledge, they’ll soon be outed. Due to their outgoing, aimable nature, communicators might tend to spend more time making friends than learning the script, so make sure to run a few dress rehearsals before sending them out into the world.

But communicators aren’t just useful in an external role. They can be equally as powerful in the office, responsible for announcements, inter-departmental collaboration, and the voice of your social events. Similarly, when you need a note taker for meetings, look no further. They’ll be able to quickly synthesize their notes into a digestible report, and send it out to all attendees.

To give them the best springboard to work from, make sure they’re competent with all your communications tools. This will set the stage for them to unleash their talent, but like your innovators and creatives, it’s best to give them a framework to work within.

4. The team player

Your team players are those with a positive attitude who are the safety blanket of your department. They’re not necessarily the kind of people who will contribute breakthrough ideas, but you can trust that they’ll work hard to implement whatever is on the table.

These personality types are essential when you need an extra hand. It’s the sales specialist who will chip in with a bit of copywriting or a financial mind who has no problem helping out with strategic marketing. They’re usually all-rounders, and often share qualities with innovators, with that enthusiasm a key trait.

While your leaders, experts, and planners may see their own role as paramount, a team player puts their ego to one side and values the overall team goals as a priority. They are usually results-focused and you can rely on them to get things done without asking too many questions. Make sure to prioritize their work and give clear instructions, then you can trust that they will deliver.

Your team players go beyond just completing tasks that others might not want to touch. Their enthusiasm is infectious and creates a great team spirit. They’re also diplomats, so when tensions rise, you can count on them to step in and cool things down.

5. The expert

In the context of personality types, experts are those single-minded characters who focus all their energy on one goal. PhD students are a classic example — delving as deep as possible into one specific area.

Sectors such as AI and healthcare desperately need experts, as these pioneering subjects sit at the edge of human knowledge. They are a playground for experts who can flex their intellectual muscles and get into the finer details of their subject matter.

Despite the value they bring, experts don’t need to be a major team player. They could even play a consultancy role, only participating in meetings when needed. However, they provide essential insights that will guide your project, and inspiration that others can draw from.

Experts really come into their own when you’re working in specific areas, from fintech and AI to niche construction projects or even a specialist dietary restaurant. If you do have your expert on a part-time basis, your leader should prepare questions in advance to make the most of their time.

6. The creative

While your expert, planner, and team player can create content that makes sense, your creative is the one who will bring it to life. Think proposals, presentations, advertising, and more. They work well with your innovators as two personality types that arekeen to stray away from tradition and find new, exciting ways of doing things.

Creative profiles won’t be too involved in the strategic thinking or the global planning of your projects, but they come into their own when it comes to social media posts, offline designs, and building web pages. They can be the creators of your brand guidelines, colors, and fonts, but remember we’re talking personalities here—you can find them everywhere, from your Marketing team to your HR department. There is often a crossover between creatives and innovators in the way they think, meaning their opinion can be incredibly valuable. Keep this in mind when you find yourself in sticky situations with no clear pathway.

Your creative team members will usually be extroverts and tend not to be the best leaders, so set the parameters, give clear instructions, and let them do their thing.

7. The innovator

As the famous Bill Gates quote goes: “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” Perhaps more in the “geek” category than “lazy”, your innovator is the kind of person who will look for the path of least resistance, which is a welcome addition to any project, especially when the going gets tough.

An innovator’s personality may naturally spend their free time looking at ways to cut corners, implement new practices, and adopt new tools. Their natural curiosity can see them going down rabbit holes, but when pointed in the right direction, they are an excellent addition to your team.

Look to your innovator when you need a bit of inspiration or when you’re bashing your head against a wall looking for a solution — they are sure to have an idea at the tip of their tongue. If not, with a clear brief, you can let them loose on a mission where they take a deep dive into new ways to improve. They’re often up-to-date with the latest trends in productivity and best practices come to them like ducks to water.

8. The pragmatist

Quite possibly the opposite of the innovator, a pragmatist thinks rationally and can often put the brakes on your innovator’s inspiration. However, it is one of the most important personality types you can wish for on your team.

Yes, they hold rules and regulations above all else and certainly don’t let their imaginations get ahead of them. But if you direct their talents the right way, they can save you unwelcome attention as your projects progress.

Pragmatists come into their own when contributing to risk management efforts. They’re often legal or financial minds that see red flags whenever plans sail too close to the wind. Sure, it’s not as fun as an innovator’s mind running wild, but coming up against legal issues when you’re deep in a project is way less fun.

When you include a pragmatist among your personality types, you can also rest assured that your compliance is under control. They’ll pick out anything that rides the borderline so you can save time on any unintentional risky business.

As a manager, you can’t avoid it, you simply have to work with different personality types — and that’s no bad thing. You’ve probably already started identifying these traits in your staff and we hope this list will help you see how to turn each attitude into a virtue that helps your team as a whole.

So, when you and your HR department are on the lookout for new recruits, don’t forget to consider the incoming characters as well as the hard skills. For example, you can’t have too many team management personalities because they’ll clash. Similarly, you can’t have a team full of creatives with no direction.

Once you’ve built your team, it’s time to get the tools that will allow them to shine. Bitrix24 isn’t like other online business tools. Instead of focusing on just one feature, you get a quality platform that meets the needs of everyone in your company.

Over 10,000,000 teams have already started using Bitrix24 for all their business processes, so why not sign up and give it a go?